Grasping and manipulation by hands can be considered as one of inevitable functions to achieve the performances desired in humanoid operations. When a humanoid robot manipulates an object by his hands, each finger should be well-controlled to accomplish a precise manipulation of the object grasped. So, the trajectory of each joint required for a precise finger motion is fundamentally necessary ...

This paper presents a new approach for personal authentication using hand images. The proposed method attempts to improve the performance of palmprint-based verification system by integrating hand geometry features. Unlike prior bimodal biometric systems, the users do not have to undergo the inconvenience of using two different sensors in our system since the palmprint and hand geometry images ...

In care activity or rescue activity, hands that can grasp creatures are sometimes needed. Therefore, it is considered that the soft mechanism that uses pneumatic elements is useful to realize such hands. In this paper, we propose a new type of soft actuator (Sponge-Core-Soft Rubber Actuator) in which a sponge rubber is covered with silicon rubber. The structure of the sponge rubber is divided i...

Speed and vibration performance as well as obstacle avoidance performance of the previously proposed Electric Wheel Chair: EWC controlled by human eyes only is conducted. Experimental results show acceptable performances of speed vibration performance as well as obstacle avoidance performance for disabled persons. More importantly, disabled persons are satisfied with the proposed EWC because it...

Gregorian chant has been simplified over the years to conform to an idea of plainchant and originally had both complex melody and rhythm. Unfortunately, this complexity has led to controversy and confusion. Even in the Graduale Triplex, which presents the original neumes of medieval manuscripts beside the widely used transcriptions from Solemnes, “in order to avoid any confusion between neums [...

When a multi-fingered hand grasps an object, the ways to grasp it stably are infinite, and thus an optimal grasp planning is necessary to find the relatively optimized grasp points on object for achieving the objective of the given grasping and manipulating task. For this, we first define several grasp indices to evaluate the quality of each feasible grasp. Since the physical meanings of the de...